Hurricane Katrina

In the last few years, there seems to have been one natural
disaster after another, and the human consequences of these gigantic dramas
have been growing bigger and bigger each time.After each hurricane,
earthquake, drought or famine, we have heard all kinds of laments from the
ruling class and its governments, and all kinds of promises about help for the
victims...

After
Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans the chaos for the survivors, thousands of
whom were packed into the Superdome and convention centre shelters without
food, water or services, showed that the world’s only superpower could treat
its poor and working people as badly as any third world country. The death toll
was over 1000.

Everyone has seen the catastrophic images. Bloated corpses
floating in fetid flood waters in New Orleans.
An elderly man sitting in a lawn chair, hunched over, dead, killed by heat and
lack of food and water as other survivors languish around him. Mothers trapped
with their young children with nothing to eat or drink for three days. Chaos at
the very refugee centers that the authorities told the victims to go to for
safety...

As with the Bam earthquake which killed tens of thousands in
Iran two years ago, as with the Tsunami which left hundreds of thousands dead
in the Indian ocean region in December, so in New Orleans, in Mississippi and
Alabama, the capitalist system has turned a natural disaster into a social
disaster.